iceintheveins

Orginal Stren and P - Line CX Premium. Both have good all around casting and handling along with enough abrasion resistance and strength.

I rig a senko on either end. I start with the fat and then when that's torn I go to the other end. When that is all torn, I then wacky rig it.

Various crawfish hues, perch colored hues, firetiger, silver flash, gold flash, chartreuse, and natural baitfish colors as well.

The texas jigheads are good, and screw in sinkers (florida rigs) work well, but this one is the bomb: www.parasiteweights.com

I love rat L traps and xps rattle shads, but cotton cordell super spots are the best.

I like smelly jelly better than any other scent. Crawdaddy, crawfish anise, and bass feast are the types I would use for bass fishing. Keep them in the cooler during summer of the jelly will melt from the heat. It stays on better than other scents. In my mind scents at BEST produce a few more strikes from interested bass. Lure action, profile, and depth are much more important. As for night fishing, noise and vibration are the two most important factors.

Replace the hooks with gammies, triple grips, or owners. At night though when it's dark it seems like a steady retrieve works better than stop and go. Other times working a jitterbug, such as normal topwater time, stop and go works much better.

Yo zuri pins are good and do cast much better. I just love the original floating action and it just seems to tear fish up.

I would rig a plastic worm or lizard weedless with a heavy pegged sinker to punch through the thick mats.

what the heck!? why??? that is a sweet fish too, i hope it is a new record too so the old one can be laid to rest. Tens of thousands of largemouth and smallmouth have been killed in our rivers along with thousands of pike and catfish. They actually throw them on the banks to rot, and in our area lakes they will not protect or enhance fisheries for fears the nonnative species will escape into the rivers. They do it because of native suckers and chubs. That's right, suckers and chubs. They blame bass and pike for helping some of the suckers and chubs to be placed on the endangered species list, but most of the science suggests that all the dams and irrigation diversions are what wiped some of the suckers and chubs out. In fact since they started killing our gamefish, the population of suckers and chubs hasn't increased one bit, AND THAT IS THEIR OWN DATA!

They do work quite well, but the action is more like a prop bait than a buzzer.

The 4 - 5 inch cut tails work great fished as a weightless senko. Split shotting and drop shotting them are great ways to catch fish as well.

I love the crazy shad from Cotton Cordell. Best little prop there is.

The berkley power minnows realistix in silver flake or white will do your job best.

The floating rap calls for spinning tackle unless your using the #18 for pike or giant bass. The floating rap will catch anything, and it's great when bass don't seem to be aggressive enough to take a popper or prop. I love to use the floating rap on a sinker rig to troll.

It would be nice to have it be a new record. Japan's desire to kill all nonnative fish sounds like the Colorado Division Of Wildlife, although Colorado anglers almost unanimously oppose the DOW. We don't have any mandatory kill waters, but some crazy enviro marxist biologists here want that.

It's a subtle double prop bait. It works really great in calm water on cloudy days or water with a teeny bit of chop.

Gentlemen, what are your frog retrieves? I usually do a very slow twitch retrieve and slow down even more around cover, stopping it a lot.

Same as always, senkos or fluke/sluggo soft jerks. Did well worming yesterday with a rib worm/split shot rig.

Generally I like a pop - pause type retrieve. I experiment with the numbers of pops, intensity of pops, and the length of the pauses. Normally it's like pop/pause, pop-pop/pause, you get the idea. I like using 5 - 10 second and longer pauses, even when bass are active.

Original Stren is the line I usually use because it seems to have the best balance of castability, strength, and abrasion resistance in one line. XL does cast well but I don't think it has much less memory than Original Stren. Just seems to break down in UV light quickly and gets broke by fish easily, even though I'm not always fishing cover. I never used it around heavy cover.

Fiberglass or a fiberglass/graphite mix is always best for cranks, topwaters, spinnerbaits, and buzzbaits. Fish can inhale the lure better, set the hook themselves, and the flex keeps them hooked much better than graphite. But for plastics, bait fishing, jigs, and any single hook or slow technique, a good ol' stiff graphite rod with lots of backbone and sensitivity is the way to go.

I've been catching both bass and pike on buzzbaits for over a month now. I know just what you mean Bobby. I own about 30 buzzbaits and all but a handful of them are Cavitrons. Cavitrons really are the best buzzbaits out there, trust me. I do like Lunker lures, terminators, Strike King elites, accent hi riders, and a few others, but cavitrons get most of the use from me. Some of my biggest bass on average come on buzzbaits, though dinks will nail them too.

X raps seem to work best in the mid spring and in early to mid fall. Aggressive retrieves with some pauses work well with the X Rap, but sometimes long pauses are good. The #8 X - Rap runs about 3' deep, the #10 4 - 5 feet, and the #12 down to about 6 feet. I use X - raps over weedbeds that are deep enough to where I don't get weed monsters every cast, in shallow areas with cover, anytime the fish are shallow and feeding. The Deep X - rap runs 8 - 10 feet but has a little bit more muted action than the shallow X - rap. Still a good lure though. The husky jerk and the rogue are more subtle than the x - rap, with the pointer having an action somewhere in between, I carry all of them.

This is a tough question because you never really know what the bass want on a given day. Slow dragging, little hops, big hops or lifts, steady reeling, stop and go. They all work at different times and you need to try them all till you find a pattern.